Sorcery (4)

Artifact (3)

Description

This is my first try at building a deck alone, trying to strike a balance of life gain and defence, hoping to hold out long enough to incite a special kind of play with the main focus card of the deck. I welcome and encourage input. I would never recommend using this deck for any serious tournament style playing, I just see it as an effective deck that should be fun to play. All criticism welcome though!

Focused around 'Drogskol Captain' being your main play, the 'Spirits of the Tidewall' deck I've designed is the 1st deck I've built without assistance. The idea is to get as many spirits and spirit tokens to swarm the field, and then hopefully at some point drawing the Captain himself which will hexproof your entire army, alongside raising their x/y.

It's no good hoping to draw the Captain for any more than 10 turns however, so I've added in a 2nd style to the deck to ensure you reach that point if all goes well. Every other card is based on one of two philosophies: Get life and buff creatures; or Get high toughness creatures out with lots of tokens to compliment.

There's plenty of cards to raise your life points here, and there's plenty of defensive cards that have either undying or put down spirit tokens on summon/death. A few have high toughness values to see you through to that critical draw of the Captain as well. There's also a few spells to enchant with or to return creatures back to hand, just take a look and you'll get a feel for what I tried to achieve.

Summary:Plenty of spell cards to either remove enemy creatures, gain life, or enchant buffs onto your creatures. Lots of defensive creatures with either high toughness, or to swarm the field with lesser cards. Final play will be 'Drogskol Captain' and the icing on the cake is to use 'Infinite Reflection' to copy him onto all creatures, meaning that with 5 other creatures, you all have +5/+5 and all have flying and hexproof (even though the Captain doesn't buff himself, the other copies will always buff him this way). This play is a guaranteed win unless your opponent has unblockables and/or nukes the field.

Once Ethereal Armour or Divine Favour went down on either Archangel or Homicidal Brute, I was in business (Ring of Thune was fantastic too if I managed to keep it on the field long enough). Ethereal Armour really came into its own once I had a few other enchantments down on the field. Dramatic Rescue and Search Warrant were excellent life savers that gave an additional effect, and won me most of my games by ensuring that I was crippling my opponent and getting something back out of it myself. Dramatic rescue was great for negating any fights my opponent wanted, since it's an instant, if I was getting blocked by a creature I couldn't win against or didn't want to take the hit from, if I didn't have a first strike card put down, I would pull either my creature back, or send theirs back to the opponents hand which gives me a direct shot at my opponents life (I confirmed with him that this was a legit move, and was doing what the card said). Once I got the Geist creature down (x/y equal to number of spirits) that was also a turning point, I had let my cards die and become spirits or spawn spirits for appearing on the field, and when they had built up I threw the Geist down to get 7/7 which gave me a strong offensive/defensive character, with the enchantment for vigilance, this gave me free roam of attacking and defending.

My only complaint is that the Niblis of the Mist didn't turn out to be as useful as I though, as most spells will kill a 1/1 creature (played against a fire deck and death deck mostly), which means that once I tapped a creature, I was instantly killed before I could do anything. Archangel takes too long to get down, so I might add more mana to even it out a little, as mana was the one thing I was screaming for once more like my other deck. The water cards were ok as part of the deck, but Stormbound Geist sat in my hand for a long time on a few occasions due to the lack of water mana in the deck, even with evolving wilds it took too long to get a 2nd water mana sometimes which was unlucky to be sure, but happened too often to be called a coincedence. Civilized Scholar and Fog Bank were extremely useful, the others didn't do so much mostly because I drew Infinite Reflection too early to use most of the time, and the rest were too powerful to waste on early game (unsummon more powerful creatures later on to cripple opponent's mana and repeat the cost to resummon), so they sat there for a while, even though they were low cost, they took a space up in my hand that could have been something more useful up until then.

The final decision I'm making is to add more flying creatures to the set, by replacing some of the blue cards, if I did this and kept the 2 most useful blues, I would have another 4 spaces for another 4 white creatures, probably defenders as that's what I felt was missing at times of peril, since I had no spells other than pacifism to regain control.

Enchantment (7)

Sorcery (4)

1x Lingering&emsp13;Souls

2x Search&emsp13;Warrant

1x Supreme&emsp13;Verdict

Artifact (3)

1x Azorius&emsp13;Keyrune

1x Ring&emsp13;of&emsp13;Thune

1x Vanguard's&emsp13;Shield

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